Earlier today, a pregnant girl was found near the Sambisa Forest in northeastern Nigeria. Her name is Amina Ali, and she was kidnapped by Boko Haram two years ago, in a mass abduction in Chibok. Boko Haram is an Islamist extremist group operating in Nigeria. It began activity in 2009, and “promotes a version of Islam that makes it ‘haram’, or forbidden, for Muslims to take part in any political or social activity associated with Western society.” (BBC, 2015) In the spring of 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls. So far, Amina Ali is the only girl from the Chibok abductions to have been rescued; other girls managed to jump off of their abductors’ trucks, leaving 219 girls still held captive by Boko Haram. (Independent UK, 2016; BBC, 2016). According to AJ+, more than 2,000 women and girls have been kidnapped since 2012 (AJ+, 2016); the Chibok incident is the one that is most easily remembered, as it garnered international attention, with the #BringBackOurGirls campaign on Twitter.
Following their abduction, some girls were sold to be child brides, while others were forced to marry their abductors (TIME, 2014)–and the age of the girls ranges from twelve to seventeen years old. Some survivors still report having been abused in the women’s shelters that they were sent to after being rescued. They were labeled as “Boko Haram wives” and shunned by the other women.
A few larger, more complicated questions remain: how does Amina Ali heal? After rescuing these women, where is the support system for them to recover from this trauma? The first days, weeks, months of reintegrating into society cannot be easy; these problems are compounded by the fact that many of the women come home pregnant, and are thus permanently marked by the time they spent under the terror of the Boko Haram regime.
We as a global community need to recognize that this violence is against the larger populace, but it particularly affects women and girls. And, though the physical effects may stop in the time after the Amina Ali’s return home, her emotional and psychological well-being need to be taken into account. For, we cannot look at her successful rescue as just a political victory against the extremist rhetoric of Boko Haram; instead, we need to look at Amina Ali and the other female victims of Boko Haram as human beings, and examine how we can help them to recover their humanity after the atrocities they have faced.
